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4/11/2022 COVID Update: The State of Maine no longer requires masking or proof of vaccination to attend any public events, but individual venues are free to do so. For the latest information, visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the State of Maine’s COVID site.
The much-hyped Malcolm X happens to be a spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change — and surely Spike Lee’s most universally appealing film. An engrossing mosaic of history, myth, and sheer conjecture, this ambitious epic manages to sustain itself for three hours and 21 minutes and overcomes an early frivolity of tone and […]
Our speaker, Winona LaDuke, is this year’s Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities. LaDuke is an internationally renowned writer and activist working on issues of climate change, sustainable development, and the rights of indigenous communities. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota and is a two-time vice presidential […]
Artist and educator Luis Camnitzer, whose conceptual artwork, The Museum Is a School, occupies the façade of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, will combine a personal reflection on revolution with a prescription for renewal without complacency in the overlapping realms of art and education. Having come of age in Uruguay during a period of widespread revolution […]
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still rampant in certain areas, making it very difficult for blacks to register to vote. In 1965 an Alabama city became the battleground in the fight for suffrage. Despite violent opposition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his followers pressed […]
Beginning in the 1920s, the Surrealists sought to instigate a revolution that was both mental and material. Art making was central to this endeavor. As a concrete manifestation of poetic thought, visual art was proof that it was possible to remake reality to accord with the unrestrained inventions of the creative mind. This talk by […]
Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice documents the dramatic life and turbulent times of the pioneering African-American journalist, activist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader of the post-Reconstruction period. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison reads selections from Wells’ memoirs and other writings in this winner of more than 20 film festival awards. The Black Press: Soldiers […]
Gospel music is the subject of this lively film, which explores the history of the faith-rooted musical style. While the documentary features a number of gospel musicians, it spends the most time looking into the considerable contributions of Thomas A. Dorsey, a pioneering songwriter and pianist, and his popular associate, singer “Mother” Willie Mae Ford […]
Does our universe have a finite origin or has it existed unchanged for all eternity? Either answer has profound implications about the nature of our reality. Dale Kocevski, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, will discuss how astronomers came to the conclusion that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning in the Big Bang about […]
Although our existence on a habitable planet can largely be taken for granted, how Earth arrived at this state of “habitability” is far from obvious. How the planets even formed is still not well understood. Once a terrestrial planet is created, its evolution is controlled by how it slowly cools, which drives its internal motion […]
When we think about the factors that led to the creation of the novel as a literary form in English, we might not think of the rise and institutionalization of experimental science. Yet the chartering of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge in 1662 had a profound impact on what novels and […]
In the space of a few hours on Oct. 23, 1947, a furious wildfire destroyed almost all of the small western Maine town of Brownfield. Neighbors fought and fled the fire, then returned, determined to rebuild their community as best they could. Drawing on interviews with townspeople, letters, photographs, and newspaper reports, storyteller Jo Radner […]
Olivia Gatwood has received national recognition for her poetry, writing workshops, and work as a Title IX compliant educator in sexual assault prevention and recovery. As a finalist at Brave New Voices, Women of the World, and the National Poetry Slam, Gatwood is an active member of the slam poetry community and has been featured […]
In April 2016, Maine bookseller Seth Thayer, Colby Class of ’89, found a cache of medieval manuscript leaves “in a trunk in a client’s house in Maine.” A Google search investigating the leaves led him to manuscript scholar Lisa Fagin Davis, who identified all of the leaves as having been sold by the notorious mid-20th-century […]
Kim Stanley Robinson, the 2018 Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities, is one of the most well-known and respected science fiction writers in the world. His work has received 11 major awards from the science fiction field and has been translated into 23 languages. His Mars trilogy was an international bestseller, a benchmark in discussions […]
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor and is the author of multiple books, including the memoir Fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and […]
Cornel West will deliver the keynote lecture for the 2017-18 Colby College humanities theme, Origins. West is professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University and a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, Democracy Now!, and C-Span. His passion is to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to […]
Born and raised on Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, poet and performer Emily Pauline Johnson was the daughter of a Mohawk chief and his English wife. She was educated mainly at home, studying both English literature and Mohawk oral history and legend. In 1892 she was invited to give a poetry reading for the […]
In late 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. launched his nonviolent Poor People’s Campaign to bring awareness about poverty and economic injustice in America and to initiate substantial change. In recent years activists across America have revived his campaign, which seeks to address the interrelated crises of “systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, […]
Dianne Harris is a senior program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she focuses on higher education and scholarship in the humanities. From 2015 to 2017 she served as dean of the College of Humanities and as professor of history at the University of Utah. She holds a Ph.D, in architectural history from […]
Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and The Last Cruise. She is also the author of two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays and articles have been published in various […]
Sammy Baloji was born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, in the mineral-rich Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He studied computer and information sciences and communication at the University of Lubumbashi. With a borrowed camera, he began photographing scenes as sources for his cartoons. He soon enrolled in photography courses in DRC and continued […]
Throughout his brief but brilliant career, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty maintained an intense interest in painting, and especially in the painting of Paul Cézanne. Merleau-Ponty saw Cézanne as a fellow explorer in the primordial land of perception, a pioneer in the archaeology of the visible world. This talk explores Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical interest in the […]
A lecture in the “Presence of the Past Series” with Jennifer Yoder, jointly appointed in the Government Department and the Global Studies Program. When Angela Merkel assumed the German chancellorship in 2005, there was little indication that she would emerge as a leader adept at memory politics. The unassuming physicist was a relative newcomer to politics. Yoder […]
A lecture in the Presence of the Past Series with Sonja Thomas, associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Many Catholic dioceses in rural areas of the U.S. are recruiting and hiring missionary priests from India. The Great-Falls-Billings diocese of central and eastern Montana is one of them. Priests from India are entering into an […]
Mark Dion, this year’s Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities, is an American conceptual artist whose work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about […]